My Amygdala Made Me Do It

A few weeks ago I read an article by James Garvey about the philosopher Peter Hacker which discusses the difference between science and philosophy. It was one of those brief pieces that occasionally jump out of the myriad items that we are both cursed and blessed to access these days via the internet. I was pleased to see that having bid farewell to his Ars Psychiatrica blog, the psychiatrist there added a postscript dealing with the same Garvey article. I particularly liked his observation that,

Hacker also assails the prevailing scientistic fetish for neuroscience, arguing that from the point of view of real human priorities, it is the unified human agent that counts, not his or her brain and its myriad parts. “My amygdala made me do it” is not so different from “My soul made me do it.” The moral self must take ownership of its concepts and its actions, not hide from them by ascribing them to the brain. Neuroscience may increasingly give us the capability to tinker more viscerally with our own experience, but this is nothing but the means to an ever debatable end. Science is nothing but a method, and one which can never identify the life most worth living. The latter can only be arrived at biographically and culturally, through lived experience, dialogue, and contingency. Everything that is not a fact exists in the vast penumbra of narrative.

This resonates with my own feelings about neuroscience’s confused swirling into ‘neurophilosophy’ and ‘neuroaesthetics’. I have promised to write on this issue, and fully intend to do so when a certain fog has cleared. I shall be starting with the philosophical and aesthetic, itself a challenge to the prevailing excitements aroused by the ‘scientific fetish’. This, notwithstanding, does not affect my gratitude for the visceral neurochemical tinkerings afforded me by biochemistry.